Ideas on how to handle complex projects with LOTS of sub-tasks

PSExcellence

I am working with on of our departments internally on their Smartsheet system, and looking for insight into how some of you handle complex project plans. What they have right now is so bloated that it is unmanageable, and making them rethink using Smartsheet as a system at all. for context, they went from using Google Sheets which they used as just a task list type tool, to a very rigid/structured project plan that leadership scrutinizes at a granular level in rollup reporting (plus tied to Resource Management for time tracking).

Basically their jobs entail LOTS and LOTS of detailed sub-tasks they have to keep track of, but including them all on the project plan has made it unmanageable to keep everything up to date. I wish you could set the dates/durations at the parent task level, and just use the child tasks as a checklist of items that have to get done within that time period…but in order for that to work then you have to turn off dependencies (which we need).

I've tried having just ONE of the subtasks (the very first one under the Parent Task) function as a "dates" task for the whole section. Basically I make the start/end date and duration of this subtask editable/visible, and then use it as the predecessor of all the other sub-tasks (making the font white for the rest of the child tasks' dates/durations so that they aren't even visible). For some reason they just cannot get the hang of using it this way and end up making all the dates/durations visible for all the subtasks again. Some of them say they need them visible because their customers need to know due dates of each task at a granular level. Which I don't understand, because then there are so many that they don't even end up keeping them up to date anyway. Sigh.

I have also suggested putting the detailed subtasks in a comment instead of child tasks, but they don't like this because then they can't track which ones are done or not.

And then I suggested keeping only higher level tasks on the project plan, and having a separate "task checklist" sheet in their project folder, but they don't like that the percentage complete won't roll up to the larger plan.

I am running out of ideas. But having predecessors, dates, durations, percentages complete, statuses to manage for hundreds and hundreds of subtasks is just NOT scaleable and not working for us. I am lucky if they even remember to set the baseline at the start of the project.

What are some tricks some of you are using to make large/complex project plans more manageable??

Archiduc

Thinking out loud, sorry if it's unclear:

How about having two sheets:

• "Subtasks" sheet has all the tasks and subtasks but no dates.
• "Main tasks" sheet has only the parents with dates, not the subtasks

You link the two by have a unique field (Auto number generated by Smartsheet) with INDEX/MATCH formula, so you can bring the other columns like status etc…

If you're smart about the naming of the columns and main tasks, maybe both sheets can fit together in one report as well?